In Edinburgh, the Plays Are Short (and Some Are Sweet)

EDINBURGH — If you’re looking for a single show at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival to introduce you to the Scottish capital, where better to start than with David Greig’s “Midsummer”?

This lively and likable 90-minute romantic comedy, produced by the National Theater of Scotland and playing at The Hub through Aug. 26, traverses Edinburgh’s guitar shops and greasy spoons to chronicle a love affair, begun on drunken impulse, that survives against the odds. With a cast of four and an onstage band that dips in and out of the narrative, the result is one of the cheerier productions amid a theatrical lineup that, on the basis of a recent weekend of ardent playgoing, doesn’t contain an overabundance of mirth. You emerge from Kate Hewitt’s energetic staging on a high and feeling as if you have seen a good chunk of the city without leaving your seat.

The play premiered in Edinburgh a decade ago as a pared-down two-hander, and some have faulted this new version for over-embellishing a happy miniature. But there’s something appropriately festive — and we are at a festival — about the heightened anarchy of this iteration, which takes place around a table festooned with the stuff of celebration (balloons, booze and the like).

As the young Bob (Henry Pettigrew) and Helena (Sarah Higgins) embark upon their relationship, their older selves — Benny Young and Eileen Nicholas, playing characters new to the script — exist to correct, amend and expand upon a story that insists on the staying power of love. Mr. Greig, an Edinburgh native who has worked widely in England and the United States, sends his romance-hungry couple careering around the city’s confetti-strewn Old Town one minute and to a local Ikea parking lot the next.

But “Midsummer” makes room for the world beyond as well. That’s nowhere truer than in the songs provided by the composer, Gordon McIntyre, which have their own deadpan wit. “If my hangover was a country, it would be Belgium,” we are informed in one.

“Midsummer” is one of the festival’s few homegrown theatrical ventures. Garry Hynes’s much-acclaimed “Waiting For Godot” has traveled from Ireland and will go on to New York in November, and there are two productions from the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris: “The Prisoner,” by the 93-year-old director Peter Brook, and “La Maladie de la mort” (“The Malady of Death”), directed by Katie Mitchell. It is left to “Midsummer,” then, to pay tribute to the rain-soaked city where it is being staged, even as its portrayal of deepening desire clearly transcends its specific locale.

Away from the festival proper, thousands of titles compete each summer for attention on the equally well-known if far more unruly Fringe: That ancillary roundup of shows, its offerings advertised on columns and bus shelters all across town, runs in tandem with the festival proper. A pecking order is quickly established both via word of mouth — especially crucial amid the seasonal melee — and the Fringe First Awards, a longtime feature in the newspaper The Scotsman and a useful bellwether of quality amid the clamor: They are announced each Friday to recognize the best new writing seen that week.

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From left, Robert Jack, Darrell D’Silva and Lucianne McEvoy in “Ulster American.”CreditSid Scott

Venues, too, make a difference, not least when it comes to the Traverse Theater, which throws a keen-eyed gaze on new writing and has sent many a play on to further life. Among the reigning hits at the Traverse this year is the Northern Irish writer David Ireland’s “Ulster American,” where a sold-out audience the other night included the three-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, who leapt to her feet to applaud at the end.

An Oscar, as it happens, figures among the props of Mr. Ireland’s scabrous three-character satire, which owes a debt to David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” updating its ideas for the #MeToo era. Both plays pit a pair of seasoned showbiz men against a younger woman who may not be quite as green as she looks. Ruth (Lucianne McEvoy, giving the performance of the evening) is a writer from Northern Ireland whose new play has (rather improbably) been chosen as a star vehicle for an Academy Award-winning American actor named Jay (a growly Darrell D’Silva), who hasn’t read the script very carefully and can’t do a Belfast accent, but does at least know the difference between James and Alec Baldwin.

That’s more than can be said for his prissy director, Leigh (Robert Jack), a repressed Englishman who is conceived in strokes so broad that it becomes difficult to take the play’s inexorable slide toward violence all that seriously. Suffice to say that the production’s fight director, EmmaClaire Brightlyn, has earned her paycheck.

There’s a similar feeling of overkill at “My Left/Right Foot,” playing to full houses at the Assembly Roxy. Also by the National Theater of Scotland, Robert Softley Gale’s hyperactive production hurtles into the politically incorrect minefield of disability jokes, only to conclude with a series of sentimental bromides. Telling the story of a theater troupe trying to make a musical out of “My Left Foot,” the first movie to bring Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar (more Oscars!), the show is a coproduction with Birds of Paradise, Scotland’s only theater company led by disabled artists. But the effect ultimately proves wearying: Even deliberate bad taste can start to bore.

Elsewhere, most Edinburgh shows are too short to wear out their welcome, in a landscape where anything running even close to two hours leaves panicky playgoers checking their watches. The actress Katherine Parkinson has written an hourlong debut play, “Sitting” (at the Gilded Balloon Teviot), featuring three people baring their souls and a body part or two as they sit for an (unseen) portrait painter. The premise raises a very basic question: Why don’t they just shut up and stay still so that the artist can paint?

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Donald Sage Mackay in “Angry Alan.”CreditCourtesy of The Other Richard

But I’d have gladly sat through more of the quietly breathtaking “Angry Alan” (at the Underbelly Cowgate), the English writer-director Penelope Skinner’s searing depiction of the slide into psychosis of an amiable-seeming American father (played by the excellent Donald Sage Mackay) who rails against a “gynocentric society” that is sidelining men at every turn.

Neatly political without ever laboring its points, “Angry Alan” is the better and more biting of two plays by Ms. Skinner to be running concurrently on the Fringe (the all-female, comparatively portentous “Meek,” at the Traverse, is the other). Festival devotees scurrying from one venue to the next will note restrooms throughout the city carrying notices that “gender diversity is welcomed here.” Mr. Mackay’s stealthily explosive Alan, you feel, would disapprove.